Late last year we said that almost every legal conference these days has a session on artificial intelligence. It is de rigeur. That is also true with respect to litigation funding. It is a hot issue. Our Inn of Court (University of Pennsylvania) did a presentation on litigation funding that, despite the fact that
Some of your bloggers recently attended the American Conference Institute’s annual Drug and Medical Device Litigation Conference in New York. One of the conference panels addressed a recent unsettling ruling in a non-drug-device case that held communications training provided by defense counsel for their client’s employees was not only discoverable but admissible at trial. In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation, 664 F. Supp.3d 981, 983 (N.D. Cal. 2023). Moreover, some of the “practices” that found their way into the opinions seemed to us not only privileged but entirely unobjectionable:
Plaintiffs also point out that, for years, [defendant] has directed its employees to avoid using certain [legal] buzzwords in their communications. . . . Eight years later, [defendant] still was telling employees . . . “[a]ssume every document you generate … will be seen by regulators.”
United States v. Google LLC, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2024 WL 3647498, at *113 (D.D.C. Aug. 5, 2024) (citation omitted). That’s only good sense, and no different than the other side (at least if they have good lawyers) tells its own individual plaintiffs before they have to testify. Continue Reading Privilege and Lawyer-Provided Employee Training
We have not shied away from letting our readers know what we think of the Bair Hugger litigation. And it’s not good (check it out here). Plaintiffs’ latest defeat is the affirmance of a defense verdict by the Missouri Court of Appeals. O’Haver v. 3M Company, 2024 WL 3034549 (Mo. Ct. App. Jun.
Much of the Camp Lejeune litigation is rapidly becoming, in military parlance, FUBAR. Even prominent plaintiff-side lawyers have started calling out the avalanche of fraudulent claims that MDL-style solicitation has been generating. Congress permitted liability, so now the United States itself is being targeted by the same litigation practices that plague MDL defendants.
But the
This is the second in a two-part series on attorney-client privilege and work product protection. We did not plan it this way, but our recent This Is Why Board Presentations Are Privileged And Protected blogpost generated a lot of interest, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an important opinion last week on these topics, so
It is a fairly common situation. A company is facing an issue that someone thinks the board of directors ought to know about, so general counsel retains outside counsel to provide advice. Maybe outside counsel prepares a memo. Maybe he or she appears at a board meeting to give a presentation with others from the
So you’re sitting next to one of your client’s senior executives. You’re at a large table in a larger conference room. There’s a lawyer for every seat at the table. There’s a court reporter in the room. A videographer too. The lawyer across the table from you slides a document to your client and gives